Sunday, March 3, 2013

O Wit

O to be as witty as some people. Like, to be as clever as Wodehouse. Or, to name someone living, as clever as Joel Stein, who also makes it look like he just types up his "Awesome Column" in maybe like, ten minutes...

"I generally advise people never ever to present assistance."

- P.G. Wodehouse

(The above I found on a pretty boring list of oxymorons (this one's better--v. amusing). It's listed elsewhere as "I always advise people never to give advice," which I think is less funny.

The Joel Stein column that cracked me up today was from the 2/25/13 issue of Time magazine...I can't find it online, so I'll excerpt some of the column (that's allowed, right?)
This is from "[Insert Catchy Name Here]," with the sub-title, "What I learned from winter storm Nemo: news events need cuter names:"

"I asked Michael Scherer, TIME's White House correspondent, to try replacing sequestration--which is the situation in which the federal budget will be different if something doesn't something before something--in all his articles with Kanye. So he wrote, "At this point, Republicans and Democrats agree on two things: Kanye is terrible policy, and the likelihood of Kanye going into effect is growing." He tried it in a bunch of other sentences and said, 'In all cases, replacing sequestration with Kanye improved the sentence and would increase my readership. Let me know how you want to take this idea to the editors.'"